As we grow older, the roads that are available to us seem to narrow down into a few different possibilities. This narrowing is a product of different limitations both external and internal. A sense of contempt, developed early, for many of these paths is what I now believe has had a debilitating effect on the forks I come across now. One of these was the contempt for discipline. I did not trust in the practice of doing the same thing over and over till you get good at it. Intuition and interest seemed like better paths that brought more creative divergence - enough to scratch at parts of my brain that found it rewarding. This when paired with the insecurities of a young introspective performer meant that I performed these paths till I heard the adulation of an audience as young as me. One day it was poetry, another graphology, then art and then research, then writing. I did the things that brought me the spotlight and I did them one after another, switching as soon as the sound of clapping dimmed. It was the fear of a loss of time. I have gone down multiple paths and returned without building homes or rest stops because those take time. Instead I leave flags - I was hear and people saw me here - it is faster and more efficient I thought.
I struggle with time, I hold no chronological timeline of my memories, they exist in the soup of entropy and surface when they want to. This has always made things feel more immediate than they should have been. Time is the one thing, I thought I did not have. I had always believed for various different and differing reasons that I would not live past 15, then 21 then 30. But those milestones blew by, what remained was this fear of wasted time, an inability to measure the future, and a difficulty marking the past.
I am at a fork now, where multiple roads diverge and the obstacles on each are clear. My heart falters because I don't know if I can commit to a difficult path anymore. On the lonely theaters of adulthood, where others perform to keep themselves entertained, I still hanker for the crowd. Adoration, intuition and interest have brought me thus far, but any farther, I have to take off my shoes. I have to count the steps, the turns, the grassy and rough patches on the road. These are roads where I do not see/hear my audience or even the patter of my own feet. I have yet to develop the practice of discipline that so many others learn in their childhood. I must develop adult patterns of following a sound into the woods where a man may not return without enough aged knowledge of the patterns and heuristics for it.
A few things are apparent, however. A lot of these patterns are not hard to learn. As giant things move, they get slower than littler things. So each of my steps are bulky and clumsy to the point where each new day of practice is life-changing but if I can get it to a mundaneness, I should be able to do a lot more.
The first step is the hardest, only harder than the next one.